The Decomposition of Delia Dethabridge
The Decomposition of Delia Dethabridge is the fourteenth episode of the fourth series of Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids. Plot Delia Dethabridge is told by her mum and dad that she is a genius, and so she believes that she needn't do any schoolwork. She tells her teacher, Mr. Pugn, when asked why she hasn't done her homework that it is a well known fact that girls are smarter than boys, and that as she is the smartest of the girls there isn't any point in doing homework that she already knows. Delia is also horrible to people like Alvin who she thinks aren't as clever as she is, but Delia thinks that everyone is stupider than she. One day, when Mr. Pugn catches a case of greenfly and has to be taken off by two ambulance men, the class gets a scary replacement teacher, Miss Whetstone. Miss Whetstone believes in the punctual handing in of homework, and when Delia doesn't have hers tells the rest of the class to read while Delia does her missing homework. When the girl protests that she is a genius, Miss Whetstone responds that in that case, it won't take her long, and instructs her to write a five hundred word long essay titled "My Worst Nightmare." The essay that Delia writes is about being turned into a dumbo by a gremlin called Gormless who snatches her from her bed and takes her away to the Land of the Really Thick and does something to her in a horrible way. However, before she has a chance to finish the story, the school bell goes, so Miss Whetstone orders her to turn in the completed essay first thing in the morning or there will be trouble, and when Delia goes to pick up her exercise book, it feels heavier than usual . . . That night, Delia doesn't bother doing her homework, deciding instead to play computer games. When she goes to bed, an overpowering smell of cheesy feet and a noise from beneath her bed disturb her. As her exercise book slides out from under the bed, it pops open to reveal Gormless the gremlin demanding that she finishes the story in order to bring him to life. Delia pushes the gremlin back into the book, then stuffs it in her bag, where Gormless's pleading is muffled by her gym socks and goes to sleep. The next day at school, Delia tells Miss Whetstone that she couldn't finish the story because if she had, the gremlin would have been released from the story and come to life and eaten her. Obviously the teacher believes this to be a lie, and instructs Delia to finish the story by the end of the lesson. Frightened to write anything bad, Delia realises that as it's her story, she can write anything she likes, so she changes the end so that the gremlin gives her a kiss and tells her that he's a fairy gremlin with the power to grant her three wishes. The wishes she asks for are world fame, a million pounds, and the new Boyz R Us single. She justifies this by adding in that her worst nightmare is that the friendly gremlin will one day go away. When Delia hands the piece in, Miss Whetstone says that it doesn't work as a piece of creative writing, and rewrites the ending while laughing. Hearing the laugh, Delia turns as white as a corpse and faints dead away. Nobody knows what happens to Delia Dethabridge that night, but she goes home from school clever and returns the next morning as dim as a five-watt bulb. She fails all of her exams and ends up smelling cheese cakes for a living, to see if they are bad. Morals The morals of this story are "Don't look down on others," and "Do your homework." Trivia * Several of Delia's schoolmates share the same designs as characters from other episodes of Grizzly Tales, such as Peregrine (The Barber of Civil), and Sam, Col and Algy (The Chipper Chums Go Scrumping). * At the beginning of the episode, a doctor at an operating table with a body on it explains that there are two lobes at the side of the brain that look like floppy saddlebags. He then proceeds to take them out of the body using a hacksaw and tells us that these are full of all of the knowledge that a human being acquires during a lifetime. * At the end of the episode, Uncle Grizzly tells us that Miss Whetstone wrote that the gremlin takes Delia out of bed and pushes his fingernails into her earholes and bursts both saddlebags of knowledge, turning her from a know-all to a know-nothing. Category:Episodes Category:Series 4